7-Eleven Promotes Brazilian Coffee with 711 Club Dating Game
7-Eleven is promoting the Brazilian flavors it added to its roster of in-store brewed coffees last February with an interactive virtual dating game, “Wake Up with a Hot Brazilian” that could win players a discount on their next cup of joe.
Developed by Ketchum Digital, the social media arm of Ketchum PR, and implemented on the Web by The SuperGroup, the game resides at www.the711club and depicts a swanky nightspot near the beaches of Rio De Janeiro.
Visitors are greeted by the bartender and challenged to score some good conversation with one of a half dozen beautiful patrons of both sexes, choosing pick-up patter from a list of multiple choices with hints from the bartender.
Each line offered registers on the player’s “mojo meter”, recording his or her progress in captivating the potential date. For an added challenge, or to salvage a bad conversation, players can ask their dates to dance and follow their moves using the computer keyboard.
With sufficient “mojo” points, a player who suggests “Let’s go somewhere else” next sees a buzzing alarm clock, a cup of 7-Eleven coffee, and a downloadable discount coupon with a store locator to find the nearest participating outlet.
As a final reward, players who top out on the mojo meter can e-mail a doctored “photo” of themselves with their dates to their friends or post it to their social pages.
The promotion, which continues until Dec. 31, is aimed at reaching relatively young coffee drinkers in the 18-34 demographic and getting them to sample the Brazilian Bold flavor that 7-Eleven added to its brewed coffee lineup back in February.
“7-Eleven has had good campaigns in the past in terms of brand promotion, but it’s questionable whether they were highly engaging,” says Chris Jones. “The 7-Eleven brand is youthful and fun, and people have an expectation of seeing something quirky from them.”
The “Wake Up with a Hot Brazilian” campaign is particularly aimed at the twenty-something “sweet spot” in the target age group, Jones says. That audience is recently out of college, employed in their first job, and just developing their taste for coffee. “That’s the age where people start deciding what they like and who they like it from. Marketing to them only gets more difficult once those preferences are set.”
Jones says the 711 Club game is careful to be appealing to both men and women and to avoid the user outcry that led AmpEnergy to apologize for and then take down its “Amp Up Before you Score” dating app from the iTunes store.
Unlike the Amp iPhone app, the 711 Club game involves approaching both male and female dates. Interestingly, Jones says, early metrics suggest that while the gamer audience is pretty evenly split between men and women, the “dating” encounters skew heavily toward the female prospects. “It’s girls playing to date other girls,” Jones says. “There’s probably a voyeurist factor there, with girls checking to see how the online girls react to pickup lines.”
The game is being promoted online and through social media; the Web site is shareable for users. After the promotion ends, Jones says, 7-Eleven may opt to port the game to its Facebook page and continue to let users engage with it.
Shortly after its launch in early October, the 711 Club received a “Favorite Website” designation from the Favorite Website Awards organization, a Web-design industry groups that singles out a Web site each day for superior technical design and execution. Chris Wallace, president of The SuperGroup, says his agency had been waiting a long time for a campaign that would let it apply the design skills needed to win an FWA daily award, which is noted on the site with a corner banner.
“It’s definitely a big deal for us to win this award,” says Wallace. “More importantly, when you win and you’re featured on their site, they get an enormous amount of traffic. So we saw an enormous peak of traffic at the TheClub711.com site, not just from people coming from the FWA site but from people re-tweeting the link to their friends.
